Fats perches with rightful ease atop his pedestal.
One of rock-’n’-roll’s founding fathers gets full and loving treatment in this biography from music journalist Coleman.
In the 1950s and ’60s, Antoine “Fats” Domino helped usher in rock-’n’-roll with galvanizing numbers like “Ain’t that a Shame,” “Blueberry Hill,” “Going Home” and “Lawdy Miss Clawdy.” Along with such contemporaries as Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry (the author also credits the influence of Joe Turner, Roy Brown and Louis Jordan), Domino brought the big beat to recognition, adding the distinctively swinging sound of his native New Orleans. Take that beat, touch it with “the heartache of the blues and the hope of gospel,” infuse it with lyrics that celebrate a passion for life, and you’ve got a sound that proved to be “ground zero for integration,” writes Coleman. He fully explores rock’s African-American roots, particularly rhythm and blues, call and response, piano triplets and the offbeats that Domino loved. Well before the British Invasion reintroduced African-American music to white American audiences, Domino had been the harbinger: he crashed a host of mainstream venues (Steve Allen, Ed Sullivan and Dick Clark, for starters) and played everywhere from the Apollo to all-white clubs. He was proud that his subversive, sensual music caused riots. Coleman covers all the gigs, all the dazzling band members and all their various travails with booze, egos, drugs and gambling. Domino and his cohorts were epic figures, but they were human, enthusiastic participants in the pleasures their music celebrated. The biography ends on a lovely last, lingering note: Domino survived Katrina and the destruction of his beloved Ninth Ward; he now lives across the Mississippi River from New Orleans, quietly with family and piano.
Fats perches with rightful ease atop his pedestal.Pub Date: May 30, 2006
ISBN: 0-306-81491-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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